Sometimes it's hard to put a finger on why no one is responding to your artwork. If you have been creating work for a while you will have had that experience of looking back on old work and seeing the flaws and understanding the issues. It's much harder to do this with work that you are currently making, we are just too close to the project at hand to see the mistakes we might be making.

You simply haven’t got to a stage where your style and presentation of the work you do is honed and refined. This means you reach a point where your work possesses a level of clarity and is distinctly your own. This takes time and practice, but people will notice when you get there.

4. You don’t understand light/colour balance and composition

Art, especially the visual stuff, requires some grasp of colour, light and layout. In writing, the equivalent would be along the lines of pacing and sentence structure. These compositional ‘rules’ apply to all other forms of creative work.Make sure you ‘get’ these basics before expecting people to like what it is you do.

9. Your portfolio is poor

Cut out the stuff that is subtracting from the quality and excellence of your portfolio collection. Don’t include crap work and keep work of different mediums, or entirely different styles within separate portfolios.

Overlapping painting and photography within a single collection, for example, will only serve to detract from the clarity that you are aiming to achieve as a creative pro.

About the author

With a compulsion to create unique visual stories, her paintings often follow the thread of a heroine's misadventures through a surreal landscape.

She's had the pleasure of teaching at Langara College and given community workshops on painting techniques with an emphasis on watercolour, oil and acrylic. She is a board member at the Grunt gallery. Google+